We wanted a sleighbed for our son, but were unable to find decent plans.
All the plans we found, and all the manufactured beds we looked at (except
the really expensive ones, like $8000) had flat panels set
into curved posts. There was a reasonably good set of Plans
in FWW of a bed made by Chris Becksvoort that gave us some useful
tips. We wanted properly curved panels. So we just decided
to make up our own plans. We did this by drawing a few sketches and
first trying to figure out what we wanted it to look like. Then we
started drawing parts of the bed in more detail to try to get an idea of
how it could be done. Things like how to join the rails to the posts,
and how to turn a long cylindrical top rail for the head & foot boards
with a short lathe, & cetera.

We built a half scale prototype in pine (cheap
& easy to work with) before we tried making a full-size bed in hardwood.
This allowed us to test our design and methods and make adjustments before
we got into the serious work. There was a bit of a temporal gap between
the prototype and the full-size bed. I had to build some Christmas,
birthday, and wedding gifts, then we moved house, then our daughter was
born, then I had to build a shop in the new house, make another round of
Christmas & birthday gifts, and so on... but finally I had the time
and place to complete the project.

The curved panels are made of 1/2" by 3/4" strips that have been bevelled
to fit together on the forms. We decided to make the head and foot
the same so we only need one set of forms. The forms are just 3/4"
plywood with 2X4 stretchers between them, set for the width of the panel.
The first of the half scale panels was glued up on a form that was not
wide enough, and so we determined that the form must be full width, otherwise
the task of keeping everything square is way too difficult. An interesting
aside is that the curve we ended up sketching out freehand is nearly symmetric.
It just 'looked right' to us.

I calculated the number of strips I needed and then ripped a batch big
enough to do the job. Then the glue-up started. This was very easy
but spread out over quite a few days. The first strip is clamped to the
form. The next strip is placed against it, and you 'eyeball' how
much you need to take off for it to match up. Then I used my wooden
jointer to bevel the strip. This kind of application pretty much
requires a handplane. I wouldn't go near a power jointer with a 1/2
X 3/4 strip of wood. Too dangerous. Besides, I don't own
a power jointer.

I used 3/4 inch stock for the strips, so I cut off 1/2 inch thick slices.
This meant that I pretty much had to bevel the edges of the strips as a
separate operation. Access to 1/2 inch stock might have made some
difference to the process at this stage. I could have ripped the
strips on the tablesaw with the blade set for have the required bevel,
and flipped the stock on each cut. Maybe next time.

I found that it gets difficult to make a series of long strips stay
accurate. Periodically (every dozen or so strips) I had to take the
panel off the form and joint it square again. If I make another,
bigger bed, I would consider putting a centre post in the head and foot
boards, and use two narrower panels at each end.

The glue up is done one strip at a time.
Once a strip is bevelled, apply glue and attach it to the growing panel.
You place some small clamps along the completed portion of the panel and
tap in small wedges between the clamp bars and the new strip. The
first panel for the prototype I glued up I did all at once. Frantic,
hectic, messy, and a good way to induce marital strife. The rest
of the panels were glued up one strip at a time.

Every night I would do one strip when I got home, one after dinner,
and then one every hour until bedtime (to give the glue a chance to set).
Each panel took about a week to put together, including ripping, bevelling
and gluing. Then the fun begins. You've got these nice
big
curved panels, but there's sawmarks, facets, and little offsets all
over the place (so much for good intentions and careful clamping, eh?).
I found the best thing to use was a good sharp hand scraper (ow my aching
thumbs!). I scraped and scraped and scraped
every night for a week to get both sides of each panel smooth. Lee
Valley sells curved scrapers, and they work quite well once you get the
hang of them. I also built a curved 'buckhorn' scraper (from FWW
#118) to help smooth the panels. This worked pretty well, but I'm
going to replace the blade in it with a thicker one to see if it makes
a difference.

The groove in the posts was plenty fun too. I used a morticing
chisel and a Stanley #71 router plane on the prototype (it was just pine
so it was easy to work). The grooves on the bigger bed were
roughed in using a template and a power router with a guide bushing.
The worst part was that the panels were not exactly the same, nor were
both ends of either panel the same. Close, but not close enough to
cut a full-width groove with a router. And the thickness varied a
bit from one point to the next. My solution was to make a template
that was "close enough" to both ends of the panel, and route a 1/4 inch
groove that could be widened to an exact fit. I scribed the edges
of the panel onto the post and used some incannel gouges to work the groove
out to the lines. This worked quite well, but I really hate that
Craftsman router.

The head & foot board crest rails were going to be turned as three
parts, a central portion (as long as I can make it on my small lathe) with
holes bored into the ends, and two short extensions with tenons to match
the holes. I figured I'd put a bead or two at the junctions to help
hide them. However, when it actually came time to start turning I had had
a bit more experience with the lathe and with boring [non] concentric holes
in turnings, so I decided that the job required a single turning.
How was I going to make a 42 inch turning on a 36 inch lathe? A cheap
crummy home-centre lathe at that. Ah, wait now... that cheap lathe
has an interesting feature: no solid cast-iron bed! Instead there
is a big steel tube that the rest & tailstock ride on. I disconnected
the bed from the headstock and moved it over about a foot and bolted everything
down to the lathe bench. Now I had a 48 inch lathe. If I had
purchased an expensive ("better") tool I would not have been able to do
this so easily! I was able to turn a pair of 42 inch crest rails
on this setup with no trouble at all.

Grooving the crest rail: I used a trick from a Fine
Woodworking issue. You put square end caps on the crest rail,
and then add two 'sides'. This gives you a flat side to place against
the fence and a flat side against the table on the tablesaw. Then
you run the assembly through and cut the dado (making sure that any screws
or nails won't get hit by the blade!). I suppose that the ENB's in
the crowd could rig up a similar arrangement to run their plow planes against
;^) I'm lucky, my wife has a tablesaw I can use for stuff like this.

I cut out the legs from 8/4 beech with my bowsaw. This was not
as difficult as I had feared, but I still only did one leg each night.
Then I used spokeshaves, rasps, floats, and scrapers to smooth the
legs and fair the curves. I bored a 1 inch diameter hole
for the crest rail mortice in each leg using my A. B. Jardine
post drill.
If anyone has any information about Jardine (from Hespeler Ont) please
let me know. The mortices for the lower rails were bored with a 12
inch brace & Rockford Bit Co #10 auger, and pared with chisels.
I used a trick Roy Underhill explained
on one of his shows: an auger bit will cut at a specific rate determined
by the pitch of the lead screw, so a hole of a particular depth can be
achieved by counting the correct number of revolutions of the bit.

Then it was time to try dry-assembling the headboards.
I had to make a few adjustments to the tenons to get everything to fit
nicely. I used a file to clean up the crest rail tenons and I used
my Hoosier Tools shoulder
plane for the tenons on the lower rails. When I stood the headboards
up I discovered that there were still lots of tool marks and blemishes
to scrape out. I'd never had the light shining on the panels from
that direction, and now the problems showed up. Another couple
of evenings scraping fixed that problem. After I had fit everything
together it was time to cut the side rails to final length and mount the
knockdown hardware. I used my Stanley #246 mitre box with a Disston
backsaw to crosscut the rails. I foolishly decided that the mitre
box needed just a wee bit of adjustment for the last cut. Not that
there was anything really wrong with the first three cuts, I just thought
it could be better. So I spent an entire evening fiddling with the
saw guides until I finally got the contraption to work like it did
before. And then I made the last cut. If it ain't broke don't
fix it.

When I laid out the mortices to receive the knockdown hardware (acquired
from one of those big mail order places, I forget which one) I made another
mistake. I laid them out from the same side of each leg, rather than
all from the outside faces. Since the rails were 1/8 inch thinner
than the legs, this put the mortices in two of the posts off-centre of
the rails. Of course I only noticed this after cutting the mortices
in the posts. Luckily, the rails were still thick enough to account
for this mistake and still provide adequate support for the hardware.
And besides, no one will see it once the bed is assembled. I roughed
out the mortices with a Millers falls #12 breast drill and a forstner bit,
and then pared with a couple of "Major Brand" Sheffield chisels and gouges.

I rounded over all my nice crisp razor sharp arrises using spokeshaves
(a little Stanley #64 and a modern Record #151 round bottom shave) and
a Lee Valley beading tool. Sure, I could've used that Craftsman router
to round everything over, but I don't trust it. Everything happens
too fast with power tools, and when I'm this close to being finished the
last thing I want to do is slip with a tool that will destroy the stock
I'm working on. So I stuck to the slower handtools for this.

Our design called for rails that flared out a bit at the ends, to blend
the curve of the posts into the rails. I just glued blocks on the
ends of the rails, and shaped them to blend in with the posts. I
glued and screwed 1X1 ledger strips on the lower inside edges of the rails
to hold the support slats. The slats are just 3 1/2 inch wide beech
3/4 inches thick.

After all the parts were shaped, I went over everything once more with
scrapers, and some sandpaper in the really nasty areas (I only had to contend
with a couple of knots so there wasn't much sanding to do). Then
it was time for the finish. We had been trying various finishes on
scraps and decided that tung oil followed by blonde shellac looked nice
on the beech.

And then it was done. I took a few pictures of the finished bed.
We couldn't get far enough away from it indoors to get the whole bed in
the pictures, so we set it up outside just to get these shots.